On Monday morning, I was driving home from a short ski trip in Vermont when I tapped the
YouTube TV app on my phone to listen in on CNN’s coverage of the Trump II inaugural. The kids were in the backseat with their iPads and headphones—a brand-safe environment, you might say, for my wife and me to overhear Jake Tapper and Dana Bash narrating the unfolding history. Cruising down an unspectacular stretch of I-87, just south of Albany, we exchanged glances as Bash noted yet another anomaly of this Boschian
portrait of modern American life: a cohort of tech billionaires taking their seats next to Trump’s family—in front of his incoming cabinet, the very people managing his administration. Somehow, it made perfect sense.
Silicon Valley’s game of footsie with the president—particularly the overtures of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon
Musk—have been endlessly chewed over yet somehow largely under-explored. Is it possible that they’re all secret Trumpers with deeply held views on issues like immigration? Possibly, but I’d surmise that they’re also calculating realpolitik executives in charge of hundreds of thousands of employees and businesses whose market caps, combined, are in the multi-trillions of dollars. So it’s also possible that they have strong views about the future of TikTok, the regulation of
artificial intelligence, or the impact of policies, like tariffs, on their long-term business plans.
And, yes, it’s also possible that their guts and manifold advisors have suggested that Trump will be at the peak of his powers for the first 18 months of his regime, before the reality of the midterms, the Constitution, and the self-interest of House members complexifies, to steal
Bezos’s coinage, the political hand he’s been dealt. According to this theory, now would seem to be the best time for them to throw their weight around or simply smile before the camera and keep their inner thoughts, whatever they may be, to themselves while they transact. (The best negotiations, after all, are the ones that don’t look like negotiations…) Indeed, the popular assessment of this dynamic posits that Trump is completely using these guys, but what if the relationship is reciprocal
and they’re all just playing a much longer game?
Anyway, I won’t pretend to be able to read anyone’s mind, but even Trump’s short-term political calculus seems a bit suspicious. As Peter Hamby notes in his excellent piece Trump’s Billionaire Arbitrage, the optics of the inaugural weren’t
just uncomfortable for his billionaire pals—they were also a misinterpretation of the so-called mandate that his sweeping election afforded him. “Can Trump plausibly claim to be standing up to powerful tech overlords and moneyed interests when every photo and camera angle shows him surrounded by America’s private sector royalty?” Peter perspicaciously noted. “Thought about another way: Trump has always derived his power from running against enemies—hated elites and the establishment.
But who do you run against when you win so bigly that your enemies just give up and join your team?”
The following day, I’d find out that my patronage of CNN was, itself, an outlier. As our partner Dylan Byers explained in his latest masterstroke, The Contracting News Network, CNN’s coverage of the inaugural
averaged less than one-fifth of the audience it had driven during Biden’s coronation a mere four years earlier. Between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on Monday, only 1.7 million people were watching CNN, down from 10 million in 2021.
In many ways, CNN would steal the news cycle from Trump shortly after the inauguration, as C.E.O. Mark Thompson confessed to the Times what Dylan had reported in Puck three months ago—that
the company will shed hundreds of jobs while it invests in hiring more than 100 new employees to architect its digital future. It’s an uncertain plan, but no one has a better idea. Dylan captures the nuances of this strategy, and there are many of them, in his excellent follow-up, CNN After CNN.
Indeed, the news has never been more complicated, and the way we
receive it has never been more balkanized, and yet both matter more than ever. These are the stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.
